American Revolution · July 1776

Why Was the Declaration of Independence Written?

By the Aurelius editorial team · 3 min read · Updated 15 October 2026

Last time: militia and regulars fought from Concord back to Boston, and by nightfall thousands of armed colonists had the British army under siege.

In March 1776, Abigail Adams wrote from Massachusetts to her husband John in Congress: “I long to hear that you have declared an independancy.” Then she added a request for the new laws she expected him to make: “Remember the Ladies.” Who would share in American liberty was a question from the very start.

Still the king's subjects

For a year after Lexington, most members of the Second Continental Congress still hoped for reconciliation. In June 1775 they created a Continental Army under George Washington; in July they sent George III the Olive Branch Petition, professing loyalty and asking him to restrain his ministers. The king refused to receive it, proclaimed the colonies in open rebellion, and hired German troops to help crush it.

In November 1775 Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped from rebel owners and fought for the king. Hundreds did. To many white Southerners, the empire now threatened their property as well as their liberties.

Common sense

In January 1776 an anonymous pamphlet appeared in Philadelphia that attacked not the ministers but the king, and kingship itself. Its author, Thomas Paine, had arrived from England little more than a year before. Common Sense mocked hereditary monarchy and argued that “there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”

It sold in the tens of thousands, was read aloud in taverns and army camps, and moved the debate from rights within the empire to independence from it. Paine promised readers that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Jefferson's draft

On 7 June Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved that the colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States”. A committee of five, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, was named to prepare a declaration, and the drafting fell to Thomas Jefferson, a 33-year-old Virginian admired for his pen.

Jefferson drew on ideas familiar to educated colonists, especially John Locke's argument that government rests on the consent of the governed, and on the Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted weeks earlier. Most of his text is a list of grievances against George III, meant to justify rebellion to the world and to the foreign powers whose help America needed.

What Congress cut

Congress voted for independence on 2 July, then spent two days editing Jefferson's text, cutting about a quarter of it. The longest cut was a passage blaming George III for the Atlantic slave trade, accusing him of waging “cruel war against human nature itself”, and then of inciting enslaved people to rise against their masters.

Jefferson later wrote that it was struck out to please South Carolina and Georgia, which wanted the trade to continue, and northern delegates whose merchants had carried enslaved Africans. The passage was itself evasive. Jefferson enslaved well over a hundred people, and colonists had bought slaves for some 150 years. About one person in five in the thirteen colonies was enslaved, and the Declaration's promises were not meant for them.

Words that outgrew their authors

The text Congress approved on 4 July opened with the claim that all men are created equal and have unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. In 1776 this was an argument for leaving the empire more than a promise of equality at home. Most delegates signed the parchment copy on 2 August, not on 4 July.

Others claimed the words anyway. In January 1777, Black petitioners in Massachusetts, Prince Hall among them, asked the legislature for their freedom on the same natural-rights grounds. Abigail Adams's plea had drawn a teasing reply from John: “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”

In their own words

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Second Continental Congress (drafted by Thomas Jefferson), The Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

Text of the engrossed parchment, National Archives. Jefferson's rough draft read “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable”; who changed it to “self-evident” is disputed.

Why it happened

• George III rejected the Olive Branch Petition and declared the colonies in rebellion.
• Common Sense turned opinion against the king himself, not just his ministers.
• Winning foreign help required a formal break with Britain.

What happened next

• As an independent nation, the United States could seek an open alliance with France. Read the story →
• Enslaved and free Black Americans, and later abolitionists, used the Declaration's words against slavery.
• France's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) drew on American examples.

Why it still matters

On 2 September 1945, in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square, Ho Chi Minh opened Vietnam's own declaration of independence by quoting Jefferson: “All men are created equal.” He was using America's founding words against France, the country that had once helped America win its independence.

Connected stories

• Lexington and Concord: The First Shots: The fighting of April 1775 began the war that the Declaration turned into a war for independence.

Sources

• Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997)
• Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
• Abigail Adams and John Adams, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 1: Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March 1776; John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 April 1776
• Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992)

Images are credited under each picture. Paintings and photographs come from public collections via Wikimedia Commons; scenes with no surviving image are marked as illustrations.